blueprint a part-by-part guide to building a better pc
THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
SO INTEL’S BUDGET BUILD this issue has seen quite the shakeup. With props to some recent sales, we see three initial swaps. Thanks again to a Samsung sale, we can slot in a Samsung 980 500GB SSD into the budget machine here, which is always a nice sight. At just an extra $6 from last time, we feel it’s certainly worth it at this price.
Another change is our mobo, we switched this out from ASRock’s B460M Steel Legend to MSI’s B460M PRO-VDH WIFI model. This change is a whole $1 more, but because the ASRocks B460M Steel Legend is back up to $119, it is still technically cheaper.
CPU stocks for Intel are more stable so, thankfully, we have no shortage for our budget Intel build again. The Intel Core i3-10100 still sticks here for now but is $30 cheaper on a Newegg sale. Sure, it’s almost two generations old, with the imminent release of the 12thgen Alder Lake chips but, for a budget machine, the performance is all that you will need. Another slight performance increase, though, for the Intel side is the 16GB of Crucial Ballistix CL16 RAM. This has a speed of 3600MHz, so 400MHz greater than the previous Crucial Ballistix sticks we had, and for just an extra $10.